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Martha C. Nussbaum

I am moved and humbled by this honor, which
came as such a surprise to me. I owe warm gratitude to all of you, and to all
the people of Asturias, for this recognition.There is something indeed surprising in this
award, and it is to this that I want to devote my brief speech.The surprise is that I am receiving the Award
for Social Sciences – and yet I am from the humanities, a philosopher who has
worked not only on political philosophy but also on the nature of the emotions
and the imagination, and on the problem of human vulnerability and
interdependency – often turning to works of literature and music for
illumination of these issues.And yet, I
think it is not wrong to classify my contributions within the social sciences.

What I have done over the years is to develop
(in collaboration with economists) what is known as the Human Development
Approach, or Capabilities Approach. This is an approach to the measurement of
national quality of life that holds that economic growth, measured by GDP per
capita, is insufficient: such an approach does not really capture what people
are striving for.The GDP approach
ignores distribution, and thus can give high marks to nations that contain
alarming inequalities of opportunity. And it also ignores the fact that a
flourishing human life has many parts that vary independently of one another,
and independently, too, of regional or national economic growth. A nation may
have high growth without political or religious liberty; but people desire to
have a voice in the shape of their political and conscientious lives.A nation can also
grow well without adequately distributing opportunities for education, for
health care, and for the basic preservation of bodily integrity – as my own
wealthy nation, with its struggles over education and health care and its
woeful record of domestic violence against women, shows all too clearly.What we have been arguing, then, is that the
right measure of development is people-centered, distribution-sensitive, and
plural: it reflects the fact that people don’t strive for national income, they
strive for meaningful lives for themselves.By developing a list of the Central Human Capabilities, which I argue
are minimum requirements of a life worthy of human dignity, I have tried to
give substance to these ideas and to suggest some definite goals for all
nations.

I believe this work is indeed a contribution to
social science, and to development economics in particular. Economics is often
narrowly focused on growth; but at its heart it is a people-centered normative
discipline, and it needs what it had at its inception, the input of philosophy,
to articulate the goals of a good society in a people-sensitive manner.

The
importance of philosophy for economics suggests something further, which is
another subject of my work: we need an education strong in humanities to
realize the potential of societies that are striving for justice.The humanities give us arguments about justice, and they also nourish
the imagination of human vulnerability and human striving, so that we learn
about ourselves and others, rather that passively deferring to a narrow
technical conception of society’s goals. It is not too bold to say that human
flourishing requires the flourishing of the humanistic disciplines. I am
therefore grateful to the Prince of Asturias Foundation for recognizing the
humanities as a significant part of social thought for the future.